


From Life's School of War

by BetterBeMeta



Series: By Sparing Sazabi [2]
Category: SD Gundam, SD Gundam Force
Genre: Brainwashing, Character Development, Gen, Heel/Face fic, Sparing the villain, Teaching a Robot to Love, anti-corruption, fanfic expansion, how the plot devices got there, series au
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-04
Updated: 2016-10-04
Packaged: 2018-08-19 14:17:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 8,933
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8211527
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BetterBeMeta/pseuds/BetterBeMeta
Summary: It is in Commander Sazabi's AI to adapt to a winning strategy. A flaw in his code, when faced with a victorious peaceful world like Neotopia. The side effects do not go unnoticed. By Sazabi, who fears he is losing his mind. By a silent watcher, who fears he might be gaining it.





	1. Symptoms

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Craters](https://archiveofourown.org/works/8006419) by [LadyShockbox](https://archiveofourown.org/users/LadyShockbox/pseuds/LadyShockbox). 



> This is a sort of midquel to The Fate of Commander Sazabi, and takes place between chapter 7 and chapter 8. Consider it an expansion or an interlude that takes a different focal attitude toward Sazabi's state of mind. and the moral questions of a heel/face turn, how to reconcile violence and grief in an utopian society. And overall, some extra context that explains some characters motivations or actions.

from life's school of war:

what does not kill me

makes me stronger

 

 

Victory was the only acceptable feeling. And it was a feeling that flattered every sensor. No more blue sky or excess solar radiation. No more rank scent of organic life. No more incessant, disorderly noise. No more touch of an unwanted breeze.

True, there was little more glorious than gunfire.

But victory was silent, and still, and magnificent.

Commander Sazabi looked out upon his newest acquisition, atop his Horn of War. See? That wasn’t so difficult. This world was nothing special. It should not have rendered his lieutenants a pack of bunglers. It was the same as any other objective. One merely had to think two to three moves in advance.

His massive form touched off what was once Neotopia Tower. Now it was his. And from that vantage, he descended to observe his new domain.

Obedient lines of robots formed up to be loaded onto carriers. Most would be dismantled for parts or taken to the smelters. Those with Gundanium structure would go to the General. It was a pity that this dimension was peace-loving. What few valuable weapons it had were ruins.

What had they called that smoking wreck? ‘Guneagle?’ How quaint.

There was no point bothering with the petrified remains far below. A few soldiers might use human shapes for target practice. But wasting labor on moving the heavy garbage was pointless. At least not until this space might be reconfigured for the Dark Axis’ needs.

Gerbera had given no orders to that effect. It wasn’t Sazabi’s imperative to question why. Let the granite weather to gravel.

Victory was enough. The broken shell of Captain Gundam, that was enough. Gundams didn’t enjoy their lot in life. They were so resolute before the end. What a look the Captain had given while being torn apart! Perhaps he should have started with the head…

Soul drives screamed when they shattered into thousands of pieces. Interesting information to know. And to remember.  
And to think about.

 _(to feel._ )

Sazabi wavered off his course for a moment. Engine feedback. He landed atop a building and waited for it to fade.

And it did. Like all things, it snuffed into the consensus of victory and was gone forever.

Sazabi looked around. He was alone.

_(exposed. vulnerable.)_

He commanded legions, he had razed worlds! He had spent centuries in authority, in counsel with his superiors, and looking out upon the reward of his purpose. This was his height of strength.

_(friendless. not to be missed.)_

The dead air crushed down upon him. Sazabi frantically looked for something—  _what? What was he looking for?_ — that was not there. And had never been there. What should it have been?

( _insignificant._ )

He took flight. The roar of his thrusters could drown out the quiet, the sensory deprivation. He rose into the muddied, dark clouds and choked. His airflow was clear. He didn't need atmosphere to function anyway. Something else was pinching his circuits. Some casing misengineered too tightly around him.

Sazabi almost tumbled out of the sky. Vainly he tried to climb higher, surpass the miasma over this world. He was withering without a sun. But he could not gain altitude. The sky grew blacker and heavier. It was throttling him, crowding him out. The world was empty, empty, empty and all that remained above was the starving void.

No, some part of his mind insisted. This is wrong. There must be something. It needs my attention. I must find it. I must consolidate it. I must secure it.

Though he had thousands of soldiers at his command, that he controlled. They were literally ‘his.’

_(but do you believe that?)_

Sazabi fled, mad to escape the darkness. He plummeted to the ground, scraped his paint on sharp blades of stone grass. The tranquility of rolling concrete wasteland and lifeless trees disturbed him, despite that he’d seen it before. But he hadn’t really _looked_ , had he? His hyperfocus could not ignore the stillness of everything that ought to have moved. He’d never been airsick in his life. Land-sick?

He pressed on and could not flinch for the gaze he felt on his back. A structure stood in the distance. A house. Something could be there. He made for it, feeling his mass crush the fragile, fossilized life. There was a road. Step over step he drew nearer.

But he knew this house.

He did not want to be here.

_(coward. afraid of your shallow grave.)_

A weight had barred the door. It took some amount of strength to push it in. A granite crash on the other side betrayed the truth: a human within had tried to brace the entrance. The pathetic Mark never had a chance. Sazabi stepped over the remains, forcing himself forward. His optic searched frantically. He changed his mind. He wanted to find nothing more.

But there, in the corner. Hidden by his shadow as he drew near. Keiko was huddled small, looking up at him with petrified eyes. In her arms, she held a stone child.

**-Resuming full-function processing. Mobility reengaged. Optical systems online.-**

The scream he'd thought was Captain Gundam came from within him. Sazabi surged forward, nearly ripped the upstairs door off its hinges. Barely ducked the ceiling as he threw open the hall closets one by one, thundered down the abused stairs. The world narrowed to a single point.

“Is something wrong?”

It hadn’t been real. That human was right there. Holding her spawn. Nor would it have mattered if things had been otherwise. Be rid of them! Leave this place and go free.

Not go back. Not to… not to _that_ hollow place _._

_(you would rather lose than win)_

He still stared for a few seconds. Keiko turned back to putting things into her bag.

_(winning is losing. losing is winning.)_

“Obviously not,” Sazabi snapped at her. He angrily maneuvered himself around the too-narrow hallway and punished the poor stairs again with his weight. Soon he was back above. He slammed the door and felt very petty about it, and hated it, and hated many things all at once.

_(defeat is victory)_

Then he tried to process what he’d just experienced. The closest concept he knew from some prior, conquered world's vocabulary. His army had once been called a “nightmare” by a captive. Apparently, humans had their own form of data defragmentation during sleep cycles, and like a robot could experience a simulation during that time. A ‘nightmare’ was a term for a particularly alarming one.

Anything but a regular processing cycle was pointless to the Dark Axis, so the parameters of such a simulation were limited. But here Sazabi was. Pointing out that this ‘nightmare’ was impossible. During his conquest of Neotopia, the human Keiko had been close enough by the end to yell up at him. Not in her house. She'd not turned into stone. And who knew where her bondmate was? The entire situation of finding them petrified was a fiction due to excess imagination. As were visions of victory.

A _nightmare_ of victory.

_(victory is defeat)_

A tinge of pain spidered through his circuits from deep under his chestplate. They had been getting more frequent. Then often drowned out by a bizarre sense of relief. It was foolish to tell his human handlers. It wasn’t _battle damage_ , and he didn’t fancy getting dissected.

He released the lock in his chestplate, opened himself up, and there was his soul drive. It was running warm all the time now. Not overheating: an _energy_ that pulsed up and down his circuits. It did nothing so overt as whisper or speak to him. If it did, then perhaps he could have learned its secrets. There were centuries he spent thinking it did nothing at all except sit numbly in his frame. That did not explain the… changes that had overtaken it. Its restlessness, its relentless burrowing into his processor and vital functions. Mild euphoria. Urges. Enhanced vigor? Sharpening of his sensors to subtle stimuli. Their absence in his dream had driven him into an instinctual frenzy.

If it was willing to rewire him, what did it want? Was it separate from himself?

The soul drive now gave off a faint radiance. The fading within was concerning. The thing had been blackened and turbulent for as long as he’d been in operation. Sazabi had assumed that just was how it looked and functioned. He could almost see through it now, the clouding inside struggling against what looked like a fixed point of light. Or a flame. That was new, or had been so obscured as to be invisible.

Sazabi stared at it. This was its fault. This was Gerbera’s fault for putting this _thing_ inside him. A control device, that’s what his superior had called it. Nothing more. Obviously, something more! The humans weren’t controlling him. It was useless to directly control other robots. So what was the object of control? Who used it? Did he use it?

Did something else?

Another minor ache emanated from it. He’d never had the compartment open to observe during one of these brief episodes. The seething mist within had strayed too close to the core. There was a small spark, a brief shudder. The thing seemed a little clearer after. A little brighter.

It looked more like Captain Gundam’s every day.


	2. Doctor

Dr. Viola Perez emptied a measured packet of caffeine powder into her coffee mug. She stirred it and threw the paper wrapper out. Then she drank the lukewarm cup half down. No point in falling asleep unless you were in bed at home with your wife.

This was the hour of the night when your lita stood over your shoulder all tut-tut, “Mi vida, do not sit in the dark with the demons.”

A tension headache was exactly what she needed tonight. She’d finally catch _it_ happening with her own eyes. The processing block map on her second screen was maddeningly stable. But she knew for a fact, she had the the data right here, that the allocation had changed in major portions. In a series of events increasing in frequency and magnitude over weeks. Always as she looked away. When she heated up her frozen dinner. When she used the bathroom for a minute.

Well, Commander. You have my attention now. And I’m going to stare at you until I see what’s going on. You’re making me disappoint my abuelita.

Which would be a feat, after fifteen years of experience in one of Neotopia’s most prestigious fields. 

She studied and modeled the artificial intelligence of mobile citizens. Her work had been foundational in building an interface for the Captain System. The non-intrusive therapies of Robo House had been implemented based on her research.

Dr. Viola Perez was not just a cyberneurologist. She was _the_ leading cyberneurologist. Two years ago, the Super Dimensional Guard had brought her in to monitor the effects of the soul drive on Captain Gundam. Her findings qualified her for the SDG’s newest

pet

project.

And they’d asked her. Dr. Perez. Will you be able to do this task under medical oath, with no ulterior motive or bias, without conflict of conscience?

(She’d locked herself in her study the day after the invasion. She didn’t come out until she held the most aggressive anti-hijack software she’d ever designed. She couldn’t apply it to her wife until she’d cried into metal arms for an hour. She couldn’t look at her without remembering what a control horn looked like.)

Dr. Viola Perez looked Chief Haro in the eye and said, “Yes, I can.”

And that was how she came to be sitting in the dark. Watching Commander Sazabi’s processes and memory allocation. She called herself the thought police these days, which horrified her wife and would have bothered her abuelita, too.

Not that she could ‘see’ the bastard’s thoughts.

Half of it was noise, anyway. This wasn’t just any AI. This was the AI of an alien robot from another dimension. The only other Axian she had directly monitored had been that Zapper Zaku and a total waste of time. There’d so much malware on that unit that any kind of analysis was indecipherable. She knew that Robo House probably had done nothing about him amidst all that _junk_ but the bot’s act was so heartfelt she released him anyway. Let him pretend to mop up the trouble he was in. He was off Neotopia. Good riddance. 

But despite his own idiosyncrasies Sazabi’s case was more comprehensive. She quickly learned what patterns depicted violent behavior. And she logged their frequency and intensity, the storage allotted to each event, and endless other factors. She began mapping what portions of his AI were dedicated to what tasks, what routed through the soul drive and what didn’t. The strength of the signals as well.

Beyond determining the ultimate fate of this one robot, this research would advance the SDG’s knowledge of xenocyberintelligence by decades. It was impossible to repair or assess any Axian without some study of their cognitives.

Dr. Viola Perez asked her diagnostics why she couldn’t even get accurate specs.

But she didn’t need to know his raw capacity to read him, suss out how things were arranged in his world. This enormous subcomputer here was specifically for targeting weapons. Just that. This specialized processing was entirely for flight— and she’d seen Guneagle’s setup, this was no joke. A sizable amount of space for planning and parallel functions. That whole nexus of connections was just murder. That’s all.

Not even a predator. A predator killed to eat. This barren thing killed to dominate. That was the shape of its mind.

A ripple crossed the memory use map before her eyes. There. There, that was something. She hadn’t caught the origin of that impulse. But it had hit some target-tracking blocks and… there! They were modified. But, to do what? He certainly hadn’t lost any of his ability to aim and shoot deadly weapons. Some sort of dual-encoding?

It wasn’t at all like watching Captain Gundam’s progress. All the _good_ parts of a mobile citizen’s brains were there in Captain from the start. Sazabi was loaded almost to-capacity with violence. Everything was for some cruel purpose.

Still, what was he doing sending _anything_ through weapons systems when he had no way to shoot? His attack protocols were not anywhere near active, and Kao Lyn wasn’t giving her a call. And he wouldn’t _delete_ such things.

Dr. Perez squinted. 

“Are you using your targeting computer _ad hoc_?”

She pulled up her histograms and traced what in the _world_ he could be routing through there.

It was visual data, yes. But the patterns it was parsing were not trajectories and none of it was making a stop through threat-ID first. It was three-dimensional imaging. And cluster identification. Required for pareidolia. 

“What are you _doing_? Looking for cloud shapes?” she muttered. No, no, they were specific patterns he was looking for. Two eyes, skin texture analysis, mouth. The signal pinged back and hit pleasure centers. Which had developed significantly behind her back. Again. That didn’t just _happen_. But there it was on-screen. He was jury-rigging his targeting computer for human facial recognition.

It was a _very_ potent targeting computer. 

“You _can’t_ _do_ that,” Dr. Perez said to an empty office. 

She felt like she didn’t blink for the next hour as she logged the events. The power and clarity of signal from his soul drive was downright concerning, given that it had never activated before. If it even could. They’d known little of Captain’s, but left it enough room and empty blocks to set up functions. Sazabi had so little unspecialized capacity and it was…

She saw a whole section she hadn’t been able to identify go active. She still had no idea what it did. It wasn’t just the soul drive—Sazabi’s AI was _making_ room on the unconscious level.  Adapting existing functions to process entirely new data. She could watch his throughput increase in real time. Quiet blocks tied up in missing weapons systems lit up, free to him.

And this was worrying on so many levels. Dr. Viola Perez had stayed up like this before in her life over Captain Gundam, and how paradoxically his aim had gotten _better_ the more his functions integrated. The idea of this _monster_ with keener senses, sharper instincts, and more lethal intelligence, well... There was some old movie where bloodthirsty dinosaurs could learn to open doorknobs.

Dr. Perez drank her cold coffee. Her eye twitched. Staying up hadn’t been a mistake though. These fluctuations looked downright _painful_. Not to mention impossible. It was probably best that he wasn’t awake to experience so much of that unknown, alien sadism quadrant being repurposed to… to…

You know, it was strange. How similar this foreign being actually was to Gundam Project AI. If you looked at it a certain way and ignored the indecipherable elements, that was modeling required for _empathy_. 

“If Robo House didn’t do anything, where are you going with this?” she grumbled. “Too little, too late.”

She was watching _imagination_ burst from an alien combat simulation matrix. Patterns of priority associated with _courage_ washed over threat assessment blocks. There was literally no room within him, but the bastard somehow made-do.

He wasn’t executing some kind of emergency drive purge. This wasn’t data corruption. He wasn’t succumbing to reprogramming, removing malign code and installing replacements. The foremost cyberneurologist in Neotopia put down her cup and her notes and laid her head sideways on her desk, spoke her latest theory aloud.

“He’s jailbreaking himself.”

She groaned.

“I have a self-upgrading killer robot iterating progressively more advanced generations of himself,” she said. “Soon he’s going to hit the limits of his hardware.”

And she began to think of that as a safe-though-horrifying end-state. He had a gruesomely powerful rig, and her software couldn’t measure its actual parameters, but even he had a max spec. Better it be used for something other than destroying all life.

That was when she saw with her own two eyes, the thing that had been happening behind her back. Three blocks hard-dedicated to onboard flight control defragmented. Four blocks were re-written, were no longer hard-dedicated, but multipurpose. Nothing else had been overwritten. His encryption hadn’t changed and nothing had been compressed. That new block had just been _created._ He’d just _expanded_ the size of his own mind. 

Had his maximum capacity been arbitrarily limited before? The other theory was even more upsetting: that his components were mutable and had no theoretical maximum spec. Could have been a soul drive thing. Didn’t make it better.

It would be enough if Sazabi was teaching himself to be a better murderer. He’d just added intelligence to a former exclusively warlike function. But, no. He was working on fine motor control. Adapting minute course adjustments from hundreds of flight hours to his grip and physical awareness. Learning how to be more gentle.

“Let me hate you for five minutes,” she snarled. “Let me sit in the dark with my demons.”


	3. Advanced Condition

“Will you be all right for two hours tops?”

It was a worthless rhetorical question. Nothing had destroyed Sazabi yet. So how could Keiko assume two hours would be anything but tedious for him?

“Depending on the task you assign? I may expire of boredom,” Sazabi said.

She had dressed herself more elaborately than usual. She meant to impress someone, or intimidate someone lesser. It was pointless to ask after her business. But Neotopians assumed everybody wanted to know the details of their mundane lives.

“I don’t really have any chores for you. I’m only going to a parent-teacher conference. But could you watch Nana for me?”

“You want me to stare at her? To prove that you can waste my time, I see.”

Keiko did that series of _sighs_ and _smiles_ that was both exasperation and ‘affection.' They flashed by quickly before she spoke, “You could talk to her at least. Shute used to tell her all about his adventures. Babies are good listeners.”

“Why would I do _that_?”

Keiko shrugged. It was an answer.

“It might not be two hours. If he's not tied up at the studio, Mark could be home soon. He can change Nana when he gets back. She shouldn’t have to eat, or be put to bed. Just keep her company, okay?” Keiko said. Then she turned to the baby in question. “Mom’s got to go to a conference, Nana. I’ll put you outside with Sazabi and you can both just relax.”

Nana babbled unintelligibly while her mother moved her to the shady front deck. Sazabi doubted that location mattered.

“Be good, you two. Nana, Mom will be right back.”

And just like that, she walked off, boarded her personal transport, and was down the road.

Sazabi looked at the little living thing in her confining basket. Two Neotopian hours had never seemed longer.

“‘Zabi!”

“What?” he demanded of her.

“‘Zabi!”

“ _What_?” he repeated.

The baby made an indescribable noise and kicked her feet.

“How enlightening,” he grumbled. “Your kind should have figured out by now how to _skip_ this stage of assembly.”

Human beings, from the poor explanation he had been given, were ‘born’ not only small but also in mid-assembly, and did not reach their optimal configuration for years afterward. Even Musha Gundams had the good sense not to enter the world utterly helpless.  It was exactly the sort of nonsense that one would expect from organisms that sprang from a series of accidents rather than engineering. 

The tiny human was watching him with her blue eyes. Disgusting. He couldn’t look away. At least she was quiet while he was talking. She liked the sound of her own gibbering voice, so clearly his was a better alternative.

“You’re completely worthless,” he said. “You oozing, organic bug.”

The grub was uncomprehending.

“You have no redeeming qualities whatsoever.”

She nodded vaguely.

“Good. You have the sense to agree,” said Sazabi. “Continue to know your place, flesh creature.”

She was kicking her legs again, trying to crawl free of the special seat her parent had put her in.

“Stay still,” Sazabi commanded.

Ugly thing couldn’t follow orders to save its life. She was beginning to whine and ball her fists. Sazabi rolled his optic at her.

“Your mother has not ceased to exist, you wretch. Assuming she is not killed, she will return.”

“No!” the child said. It didn’t mean at all that she understood Sazabi. It only meant that she’d learned ‘no’ was about not getting her way.

“Be silent!”

“No!”

“Don’t argue with me, insect.”

“No!”

Sazabi grumbled. This was not a productive conversation. “I will show you your mother’s most recent location,” he said. Then as he reached for her, he remembered. His grip could crush her. And then Keiko would destroy him. Which would be a release from this place. But Sazabi was not _that_ desperate.

A warm touch brought him back to his actions. He’d frozen only centimeters from the human child. Nana was grabbing one of his fingers in her entire, tiny hand. How weak. And small. It couldn’t do _anything_ by itself. Obviously to avoid pointlessness it needed a handler.

He picked her up. He didn’t even have to think about it. It was like altering course at mach speed, only the finest control was necessary. Well. Whatever it took. He lifted the being up so she could view the road. “See? Gone.”

Nana cried out happily. Her father lifted her up this way often as a kind of play.

“Your mother has abandoned you to me,” he said. “What a fool.”

“Fool,” the child repeated.

“Yes, you vile creature.” He brought her down to hold her more closely. There was less of a chance she could somehow wriggle free, if he couldn’t grasp without damaging her. “Your mother is a nuisance, and you’re no better.”

Nana smudged her sticky hands on his armor. “Fool,” she said.

“No. I’m not the fool.”

“Foo,” she said.

“Bar,” Sazabi said back.

Even something so simple was beyond her. “Hello, world,” Sazabi grumbled with a vicious irony. Then he began to walk around the outside of the house.

“I cannot believe I was defeated by this place. Look at you. Look at _this_ ,” Sazabi said, gesturing with his other hand towards a line of neatly-trimmed bushes that trailed down the road. “What sort of investment is that? A waste of time and resources better spent on something _useful._ ”

Maybe humans were driven to _arrange_ things to fill their short, pointless lives. They had _some_ sense of aesthetic. They could design Captain Gundam, after all. And they did groom their plant infestation in mathematically recognizable patterns. Even if at some point it was imperfect, _that_ topiary was five degrees off and—

Sazabi shook his head. He wasn’t going to put the brat down to uproot a tree. There was time for that later.

“My point is that you are an unnecessary gamble. What guarantee do your handlers have that you’ll develop into anything worthwhile? None!”

He passed the garden. “That you will be their ‘flower,’ and not their ‘weed.’”

And the child had no answers. Maybe that wasn’t the point. But that was a significant line of thought.

“This is their strategy,” he said experimentally. “To place their energy into a few units of great potential. On the off-chance that this approach prevails, they win their expensive gambit. Otherwise, they perish.”

Sazabi switched the little maggot from his right hand to his left as he turned the corner. She was staring at him intently and she might as well get a better angle in this light. He continued around the house, explaining to her.

“If I had destroyed Captain Gundam, that would have been the end for them. They have no more resources to resist me.”

He walked faster. “It doesn’t matter if you’re their spare. The time they’d wasted on their version-one child, the time they’d wasted on you. Their own lives. All that effort to bring you to fruition would vanish.

“So why do they bother? They were lucky with Captain Gundam. Why do they believe they will be so fortunate again, and again? Based on what? Their aversion to the alternative? Ridiculous.”

“Fool,” Nana giggled.

“Yes. In every possible way, they are foolish. The end of their world can’t be deterred by _believing_ otherwise. But that is their strategy.”

He thought.

“Through studying their customs, they believe the act of investing effort itself grooms the result. They _have_ no reason to trust that, after ‘weeding’ their gardens, more weeds will not arise. It is inevitable. But, over time…”

Something within his mind suggested the answer. It wasn’t a flawed model. His scenario simulator insisted on it. Success in this approach was related to _attachment_ to the _valuable_ final product. The humans did not demand he weed over and over again for _hating weeds_ , but for _nurturing the flower_ s. Planning a set amount of steps in advance was not good enough. That was merely assigning and managing assets. Not…

Despite prior successes, doing his _job_ effectively.

Sazabi held Keiko’s child up before him. To get a better look. “For now, you have no choice but to be ruled. But your superiors will shape you into your most effective form. And then you will decimate your enemies, for what a human’s are.”

She seemed to think this was a noise-making game and laughed in his face.

He struggled to describe, or even to think. Or to feel. A force of will called from within him, ancient and new simultaneously. Guide. Lead. Responsible. _Mine_.

He had no native key for the emotion he was constructing from scratch. He walked forward in a trancelike state. He couldn’t parse it. Non-hatred, but active. Pride, but purified. Affinity, but stronger. Monstrously stronger even in vestigial form.

Sazabi made it back to Nana’s safety seat and placed her in just before the spasms hit his motor processes. His voicebox emitted a snarl, the pain radiating from his soul drive straight up through his circuits. His sight blacked out for one, two, three wrenches. It hurt to write this new emotion to himself, it was so vast. His mind wedged open wider so it could torturously fill the cracks.

He hadn’t experienced a drive failure. He was reeling over, optic flickering back online. The sensation pulled back from his circuitry and into his soul drive once more. The warmth without heat had intensified. It was nourishing.

“Hey, hello? You okay there, big guy?”

The human Mark had returned and— the focus, the detail of the world, _incredible_ — ugh, what did _he_ want?

“What do you think?” he said.

“No reason to get all defensive,” Mark said. “You made one heck of a noise.”

“You feared for your offspring. There’s nothing to be gained in concern for me.”

Mark laughed at him just like his daughter, uncomprehending of Sazabi’s meaning. He gave the mech a firm pat on the shoulder plate. Repulsively, Sazabi _felt_ something from it, could understand its significance.

“It’s not that complicated,” said Mark. “If I yelled, maybe you’d come running too. That’s just what you _do._ ”

Sazabi began to formulate an argument, but the human may have been correct.

“I don’t care about you,” Sazabi said hotly. “You’re nothing.”

“You hear that, Nana? Sazabi’s being a big grouch again,” Mark said. He scooped up the one-year-old child who seemed just as delighted to be around her father as her potential despot. “Dad’s here to save you from the old dumpster attitude.”

Sazabi watched him bring his young inside.

“Mark.”

Sazabi had never used the being’s name before. The human immediately stood still.

“What’s up?” he said warily.

Sazabi lifted his head and squared his stance to make his imperative absolutely clear. “I have very high standards. Your version-one child set a certain precedent,” he said. “Spare no expense on future unit training.”

Mark bounced his daughter on his shoulder incredulously.

“Thanks, I think,” he said. “I will.”


	4. Prognosis

Dr. Viola Perez pulled up a long, peaceful drive in residential district 8. It was relatively remote on the outer zoning ring. Lots of green, lots of houses on hills and plenty of space. If you didn’t like the city bustle you lived here. Or, if you valued privacy.

The park nature was well-groomed and untouched by the Dark Axis. Few pits or stone craters. It wasn’t so far out that the badlands crept in, the desolate soil beyond Neotopia’s limits.

There were other green lands on the planet’s surface, of course. But no other cities or nations. Expansion just wasn’t a Neotopian value. There were enough old stories of an ancient world with countries and states and wars and horrors to go around.

(Apparently, one of the states had been called ‘Michigan.’ What sort of a place was _that?_ )

Finally she stopped her car in the drive of a charming little nu-modern home with a wide patio and craft-glass windows. She locked the car and turned around to see a row of nicely-groomed bushes. The third in the line had been roughly uprooted, repositioned, and stuffed back into place.

Dr. Perez straightened her purse and approached the front door. The doorbell played standard chime #3.

The woman who answered the door was a little younger than herself, wearing a white apron and a friendly smile.  She held two oven mitts in one hand. “Yes?”

“Keiko Ray, right? I’m Viola Perez. I’m with the SDG. Do you have time for a chat?”

“Of course,” said the woman. “Do you mind if it’s in the kitchen? I’m putting in a few batches of cookies.”

“I don’t mind at all,” said Dr. Perez. “They smell wonderful.”

She took off her hat and her coat and hung them on the pegs by the front door. She could see where furniture had been moved somewhat in the front hall for wider clearance. The rug divots where the couch in the living-room area had once rested, for example.

Keiko led her left into a sunny, well-designed kitchen. “You’ll have to thank Mark on that one, actually. It’s his family chocolate-chip cookie recipe. Can I get you water? Juice? Tea or something?”

“I’m trying to wean off coffee, actually,” said Dr. Perez. She put her purse down on the table. “Water’s all right.”

Her ice water came in a clean glass with a pattern of ducks on it. The plain ones were probably in the dishwasher.

“Please, excuse me for being direct,” said Keiko. She opened the oven and pulled out a finished sheet of golden-brown cookies. “Is this about my son? Is he all right?”

“As far as I know, Shute’s fine,” said Dr. Perez. “Still in the Minov Boundary Sea. But that’s not why I’m here today.”

Keiko breathed out her relief. Then she nudged the cookies off the parchment onto a rack over the sink. “Thank goodness. I was worried about what kind of visit this was,” she said.

“Ms. Ray, is Sazabi here?”

“Hm? Do you want to speak with him?”

“I’d like to speak with you,” said Dr. Perez. “About him. And… well. Oh, it's futile. His hearing is more advanced than yours or mine.”

Keiko rolled her eyes. “That’s news to me. You’d think he’d be better at listening if that was true,” she said. “He’s out back. You can say whatever you want, most likely.”

Dr. Perez bit her lip. Her goal felt impossible to get-to. “I should start explaining myself,” she said. “I’m a cyberneurologist. I’m Sazabi’s cyberneurologist.”

“I see. Is there a problem?”

“That’s a complicated question to answer,” Dr. Perez said. “I think I would have to say that I don’t know. Or whose problem it would be. I only want to ask you some questions, and… advise you on my patient’s...”

She took a drink of water.

“His progress,” she finished.

Keiko Ray was a sharp woman. She knew that was a lacking answer, in the best possible sense. And she had the _mother_ _look_ down. She paused for a moment, considering how to respond. Then said, “I’ll answer your questions as best as I can, under one condition. Wash your hands and roll out cookies with me. Then we’ll talk.”

Which seemed reasonable, if a little eclectic. So Dr. Perez scrunched up her sleeves, rinsed at the sink, and began rolling cookie dough into evenly-spaced balls. “This looks like a lot of cookies.”

“That’s the last of the flour and eggs in the house. There’s going to be a party for one of my students tomorrow. I’d like everyone to have at least two,” said Keiko. “So what would you like to know?”

“How has your time been? With him, I mean.”

“You ask very broad questions, you know.”

“You’re very good at evading them.”

Keiko laughed softly. “I’m sorry. I just don’t know where this is going,” she said. “Sazabi’s been fine. A little antisocial, but that’s all right. He hasn’t had an incident in over a month.”

“By ‘incident,’ you mean an attempted murder.”

“Oh, no. He’s locked up for getting too angry at the sun before,” Keiko said. “But, I guess you could put it that way, yes. Some of them were.”

“Does that bother you?”

Keiko rolled a ball of dough in her hands for a short time.

“The right answer would be to say no. That it doesn’t. But of course it does.”

She placed the unformed cookie on the sheet, nudged it a little to the side. “I’m a teacher with four classes of fifteen children. What do you think happens if one of them decides to hit me?”

“They get sent home.”

“Sometimes. But it tells me that there’s something wrong. Maybe it isn’t best to send them back to their parents,” Keiko said. “Of course I worry when a student acts out their frustration. But it’s part of the job, to do what’s best.”

“We’re talking about a 270-kilo war mech here.”

“If you asked him he’d say we’re nothing but water and skin. I try not to take that attitude back.”

The sheet of cookies was complete. Keiko excused herself to set it to bake, and then tear a new sheet of parchment paper over a third batch. She returned ready for more.

“Let’s try again,” she said. “How has Sazabi been? He’s been good. Harder to handle than my son, but not as much as you might think. He’s very bright, once you get past the attitude.”

Dr. Perez began rolling cookies again. “How bright?” she asked.

“You’re a scientist. You know there’s no real way to measure that,” said Keiko. “But after a little show and tell he’s understood almost everything I’ve asked him to do. Even if he’ll be dramatic about the reasons why.”

“How quickly have you seen him learn?”

“No better or worse than my son,” Keiko said. “But he’ll get frustrated if his work isn’t perfect, or if he can’t know a practical reason why he’s doing something. He learns best if you give him a problem or challenge. Or tease him a little, but that’s speaking his language.”

“Aside from the obvious, er, lack of murder, how would you say his behavior has changed?”

Keiko had to think again. She was more careful with her words than almost anyone Dr. Perez had ever spoken with. “His voice,” she said at last. “Don’t get me wrong, there are still many things he says to avoid really talking to you. But he speaks less... frantically. I hope he’s learning to open up a little. I’ve also caught him touching things, like the laundry. He’ll anticipate what you’ll want him to do and he’ll do it before you ask, but he’ll guess wrong sometimes. I’m not sure if that’s a try at being considerate or not. And he’s certainly gotten more careful not to knock everything over.”

“Interesting. Would you say that these changes are learned behaviors?”

“I don’t understand what you mean, I’m sorry.”

Now she had to explain. But how? She re-counted the amount of cookies in the row and added some extra dough to one that had been small.

“You haven’t forgotten that you were given custody of Sazabi as… well, a _hopeless case_. His drive to take lives is encoded in the hard sense, specifically dedicated. Specialized, even. There’s nothing Robo House could do. Short of just… wiping him.”

Which was cruel and forbidden on Neotopia. A death sentence for robots that left a vacant body. Outlawed in every penal code imaginable.

“I don’t like to think any case is hopeless,” Keiko said. “It’d be different if he was from here, and had chosen to become what he was. I would have never let him in my house. But he’s from a troubled home, I think.”

A troubled home! Killer, an invader! A destroyer! An enslaver, even!

“I wouldn’t sympathize with him. He is more than capable of using you to get closer to an escape, or an act of revenge. I’ve seen whole parts of his mind set up just for planning that sort of thing.”

“It’s not as if I don’t worry about that, too. And I haven’t forgotten what he’s done,” Keiko said. “But the way you’re talking about this, you think he’s faking… or I’ve done something you couldn’t do.”

The first batch of cookies had cooled. Keiko offered her one. They really were delicious.

“Thank you, these are great,” said Dr. Perez. “But please, I would not dismiss him just because he’s not _directly_ trying to kill you anymore.”

“So what’s the matter?”

She watched as a batch came out of the oven, a new one replaced it, a new parchment paper on the first cool cookie sheet. “You need to understand that his aggressiveness isn’t merely a personality. Most of his AI was previously taken up by weapon systems. Even if they were removed from his frame, they still exist to him.”

She sighed. The closer she approached this argument, the worse it sounded.

“I’ve lost all reference mapping him,” she admitted painfully. “His AI has been... advancing beyond my ability to keep up. I am still not sure if it’s your environment here, or an internal factor, or a combination of both. But however it’s happened, this robot is in an out-of-control self-sophistication mode.”

“Doesn’t that prove that there’s hope for him, though?”

“No,” said Dr. Perez. “It’s dangerous.”

Keiko probably wanted a better explanation.

“Ms. Ray, the SDG initially had a no-contact directive on Captain Gundam. Beyond that secrecy would distance people from his dangerous work, we didn’t know how his unique AI would develop. And he was a defense robot, programmed to protect Neotopia. Sazabi… he’s not,” she said. “He’s designed to eradicate endless masses of targets, dominate opposition _and_ his own contingent: a _tyrant-class_ command unit. We had to _invent_ that to describe him, his ordinance grade didn’t _exist_ to us before him.”

“I gave him a C+ on his homework and he won’t take out the garbage without a tantrum.”

“His growing ability to track eye contact or differentiate voices, it’s not replacing his combat computing. It’s enhancing it. And he’s only getting smarter,” she said desperately. “How long until he backdoors a way around his security bolt?”

Keiko looked down.

“Can you trust that he won’t have another ‘incident’ _forever_?”

“Watch this,” Keiko said.

She took a plate from the shelf and began piling cookies on it. A whole sheet’s worth, in a mountainous pile almost spilling off the edge. Then she walked through to the living room and across the rug. Dr. Perez watched her go out onto the patio. She placed the cookies outside and closed the glass door.

“I don’t get it,” Dr. Perez said when Keiko had returned.

“Just watch.”

The timer on the recent batch counted down for about a minute. Then Dr. Perez seized all over as the enormous form of Commander Sazabi came into view from the left side. She clenched her fists, sweating. Two and a half meters was less in her imagination. He moved with a decisive fluidity. Dios mío, there was one-way glass between her and that searching red optic!

He tilted his enormous head, examining the plate left out on the deck table. He looked right, then left. When he was sure he was alone, he picked up the plate and stared at it intently. As if debating what to do.

She saw him _unhinge his face_ and dump the cookies into his _horrible jagged maw_. Then he walked away, leaving the plate behind.

“That’s Sazabi. That’s him holding my daughter,” Keiko said. “That’s who you’re talking about.”

“Holding your…” It hadn’t even occurred to her to look twice. “You let him around your _child_?”

Keiko didn’t look at her when she answered the question. “He responds positively to being given responsibility.  And she’s too young to ask anything of him. He’ll talk at her for hours, mostly to himself. It’s better than holding it all inside, and he’s not going to admit anything to anyone who could hold it against him.”

“How could you?! You’ve given him a hostage! He could even be learning your reactions and how to manipulate humans! He’s already learned how to get your trust!”

Dr. Perez didn’t expect the tears to come so quickly. Out the corners of her eyes, under her glasses. Going off like shots down her cheeks, bullets into her dignity. Her credibility. The reason she was here in the first place.

“You think because he likes _dessert_ and plays with your _daughter_ he’s anything different? Like that changes anything about him, that he’s made a _miracle change of heart_ , and that… that he doesn’t control you?”

She sobbed into Keiko’s shoulder. She couldn’t escape. No freedom, no closure. No one more to blame. The oven timer went off behind them. She felt a pair of mitts pressed into her hands.

“Could you please get that batch?”

Dr. Perez nodded. She felt the plasma in her veins puddling down by her stomach, her acid wet breath fog her lenses when she opened the hot oven. Soon she was hunching over the kitchen counter with her eyes pinched shut. Trying to catch her breath.

“I’m fine,” Dr. Perez said. “I'll be okay. I… I’m sorry. I just can’t take much more of this. I was happy for him to be… be what he is. I was ready.”

“So why did you really come here, Viola?”

Her throat could only whisper the truth. “I have an electromagnetic rifle in my trunk,” she said.


	5. Prescription

They ended up with eight batches of cookies and packed them into a stack of three plastic containers. Dr. Perez stayed for dinner. Keiko introduced her to her husband Mark as an old friend from university. He seemed content with the explanation, more excited to talk about the new soundtrack series he’d been brought in to help produce. Documentaries weren’t always the most exciting material, but better than commercials.

Keiko had told her to try _talking_ to Sazabi. Try asking him some of those questions. But she’d refused. Just his _presence_ made her shake. He’d come back in from outside later and leered at her on the way up the stairs. He was so hulking tall that he had to duck inside, wide enough to have to move sideways. And she’d still felt he’d never stoop to speak to her.

She’d never actually seen the Commander Sazabi in person before that day. She knew him from a graph of system memory. Before that, a projected image on a console screen. His pauldron armor and ornamented bodywork had not been replaced. It was hard to say if that lessened his menace. It was a different kind. The menace of a beaten giant, nursing his wounds. He was his own elephant in the room.

Dr. Viola Perez drove down the dark road to the throughway. She did not pass or meet a single other car. The trees flashed by on one side. On the other, Neotopia’s bright city glittered in the distance.

The radio wasn’t on. She listened to her engine’s sound.

Neotopia had no need for a ruler. That’s what Keiko had said. That’s what she’d told Sazabi and that’s what she’d told her too. It didn’t need the _actions_ of a ruler, jails and executions. It didn’t need anyone to control the thoughts and feelings of its citizens, directly through subjugation or indirectly through threat.

Yes, she was sometimes afraid. But more important than that fear was to at all costs avoid spreading that kind of world. Her son was off to liberate dimensions from it.

Dinner had been pleasant enough. Now she could cry without anyone seeing her. That was the nature of an automobile at night. The puddle of her headlights shimmered, each needle shadow blurring.

She should never have brought the gun. Why did _she_ feel like she was possessed by a violent force?

She met a red light in the middle of that dark road. She stomped down on the brakes, cursing caffeine and getting off of it. A small red robot appeared in her headlights, staring at her with its one piercing optic. She jerked the steering wheel to the right.

Unflinching, it reached out one metal hand and _pushed_. 

Her small civilian car lifted off one side. Dr. Perez watched Neotopia’s city lights sink below her horizon. She crashed over the rail, slamming her into the airbags. The car rolled. Her neck lashed against the seat.

The liquid quiet spun around her.  A tree was too close. Shuffling footsteps cut between her breaths. Closer over dead leaves and broken wood. A rending smash, a tearing of metal. The car shuddered. Someone was… the trunk? Someone had ripped open the trunk?

She fumbled for the seatbelt. The car door whined, then ruptured and flew off its hinges. Dr. Viola Perez looked over the deflating airbag to see that red light staring at her.

“You’re not working with him,” she said weakly.

The demon reached up and seized her by the hair.

“Fear is my colleague,” it said, and smashed her against the steering column.


	6. Therapy

Neotopia’s SDG had some perspective at least, Sazabi thought. They weren’t going to reinstall his flight thrusters in an enclosed space or in the dedicated labs full of expensive, permanent equipment. They were going to do it off the main launch runway, with the least amount of risk to their facility and units possible. They weren’t even going to bring their head engineer. Two GM technicians and their human aides received orders over comms that Sazabi couldn’t hear.

“Please stand here,” one of the humans asked of him. “Then, please power down.”

Keiko was over to the side.  She waved at him, smiled a little bit. Sazabi grumbled and moved over the site marked with tape. It had taken over a week for them to actually restore these shattered components after the first visit. He’d obey only for what had been promised to him.

He shut off his sensors one by one, withdrawing into the refuge of his armor. Just short of sleep mode. Voluntary mobility would interfere, confuse his device discovery. Sazabi wasn’t processing sound, or seeing, or moving or doing anything but monitoring his ventflow and other internals.

But it wasn’t silent. Not anymore. The one-two pulse in his chest cavity beat bigger in its confines. It was a constant presence. With all other stimuli muted, Sazabi could bask in it. It averaged 60 BPM.

He was too numb to feel the technicians touch him. But he was surprised to find some form of sensing was still active. An echo over his processing, different from the phantom limbs of missing components or the nonresponse of absent funnels. His soul drive’s emittance fell upon nearby beings, a blind-sight. The quiet shapes of nearby robot minds, uniform and closed to him. Humans were amorphous live wires. Their signals sparked in every direction, but faded away at distance. Only a few were fixed: constant channels he’d learned to listen for.

And even then, hazy. No location. Presence. Absence. One must have been the human Keiko, who stood close by. She had at least the sense to be plain to him. Her bondmate was _somewhere_ , but his vagueness was the same in all things. A tiny, bright star shone from kilometers below.

A heavy, firm weight rebalanced him. It locked into place, connections re-establishing. He’d never before had to replace _any_ part of himself. Or know his awareness spreading out into uninhabited circuitry. A moment of concern when he found that his onboard driver did not quite match the hardware anymore.

Then, suddenly resolved. No error. It wasn’t difficult to re-recognize his own components… intended for a legacy version of himself? He began switching on his sensors. Touch mapping first. Sensation returned, tingling with numb static that evened out into normalcy.

This metal was cold and dead. But the warmth in him soon spread, reaching out to new extremities. Soon they were full of him: his mind, his self, his heart.

Sazabi switched on his optical processing. Then his sound feed. Then atmosphere analysis.

“Clear! Stand clear!”

The techs leaped backward just before he stretched his kinematics. He fanned out, feeling the bright sun on his body. And he could not restrain his hungry laughter while he tested the output, blackening the metal beneath him and letting… _something_ loose. He lifted off, hovered at expense. But it didn’t feel like a waste. It felt like… what? Like being more whole?

_(freedom.)_

What was the feeling, when receiving a ‘gift?’

Joy?

A sickening emotion, knowing that these were the ones that had _taken_ this from him. Feeling it spill from him, a demeaning gratitude.

The techs and GMs crowded back, all fearful of what he would do. Keiko stood where she was. Smiling warmly at him, either undaunted by the display of his magnificence or well-mastered in concealing her concern. She was speaking, but his thrusters were too loud. He lowered back to the deck, feeling the red-hot scar beneath his pedes.

“ _What_ are you trying to tell me?”

Sazabi watched as the cowards turned their sights to Keiko as well. They knew one with greater endurance than themselves. She smoothed her clothing in the thin, insistent breeze.

“Would you please get some groceries on your way back home?” she said. Then pursed her lips, as if in thought. She continued with more direction, “there’s a UC-Mart not far from the house, has a big sign right outside you should be able to see from above. Please get a bag of flour, a dozen eggs, and a bag of peas.”

The clouds slipped past the flight deck. So a ‘gift’ meant expanded duties. Typical. Of course it did. Of course she would. 

“But please, try to have fun,” she amended.

And what did you say to _that_? She knew his idea of ‘fun.’ It was not something she encouraged.

“Fine,” he glowered.

Then launched again into the air, and felt his spirits rise again with the rest of him. Let them see his mastery, the height of grandeur they’d plucked from him. Leave limitations bound to earth with the humans and their dirt-crawling souls. He conquered the sky, culminated into the sun’s light. Nothing would bring him down.

 

From war’s school of life: 

what does not kill me

let me live


End file.
